A staple of Cyberpunk media. Megacorporations typically are depicted as having "Company Security Forces" which are often as powerful as the military of a small nation. Besides the option for open warfare, they also heavily indulge in covert operations against their business rivals, ranging from espionage to sabotage and "wetwork", meaning assassinations of key personnel.

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In Real Life, the East India Trading Companies officially conquered and outright governed large areas of India in the name of their home nations.

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Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Killing Bites is about genetically altered werecreatures brawling on behalf of the zaibatsu corporations that mutated them. Originally the tournaments were formed to prevent mass bloodshed, but most therianthropes are happy to break that rule if their masters command it.

Spice and Wolf: During certain arcs (namely the devalued silver coins one), there is a trade company that has enough men to do the thug and garrote routine without problem by sheer force of numbers. The other Traders had a nice Intel network of the city maps and then Lawrence has Holo. Considering the setting, the idea of using men for pressuring and muting the lone merchant they scammed is logical from their point of view. Karma on the other hand...

Comic Books

Parodied in the Cursed Earth storyline in Judge Dredd. Gengineered mascot creatures battle each other for supremacy long after the corporations they represent have vanished. (Apparently these chapters could not be reprinted due to trademark infringement.)

A big part of Marvel 2099. When they say "hostile takeover", they mean "hostile takeover".

One of the main villains of Thor (2014) is Dario Agger, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who can turn into a Minotaur and is invading other planets for their natural resources. The climax of one arc involves several other CEO supervillains declaring war on him for not cutting them in on the action. Among other things, it turns out that Roxxon has a whole team of low-rent Hulks ready to deploy at a moment's notice.

The East India Trading Company is featured in the second and thirdPirates of the Caribbean movies. Not only do they have a private fleet and army with a worldwide reach, they also control the Flying Dutchman. The Company wages war on all pirates, intent to wipe them out. Not Truth in Television: the East India Company did arm their ships defensively, but actually fighting wars was the province of the Royal Navy (though they did admittedly have a lot of pull with the government to get the Royal Navy to go where they wanted.)

The premise of the original Rollerball was that corporations had taken over for governments and waged wars on each other, until they decided wars were too expensive to their bottom line and instead invented the game of Rollerball where the companies could battle it out in the arena.

RoboCop 3 has Omni Consumer Products (and its new shareholders the Kanemitsu Corporation) hire a band of mercenaries to force out the inhabitants of Old Detroit. To combat this, the regular folks form a underground resistance. Oh, just to make sure their investment pays off, Kanemitsu sends robot ninjas to aid their hired guns.

The film Matewan involved conflict between a coal company which controlled most of a West Virginia town's economy, and local miners endeavoring to form a union in the 1920s. The company had contracted with a Pinkerton-style mercenary force called the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, which sent a platoon of gunmen into the town to suppress the miners' strike. Truth in Television: this film was loosely based on true events that occurred in Matewan, West Virginia at that time. And suppression of unions through such means was common elsewhere in the U.S. in that era, often involving the actual Pinkertons.

Silent Movie. Engulf & Devour intends to purchase Big Picture Studios, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. Upon learning that director Mel Funn's upcoming film may save the studio, Engulf & Devour attempts to sabotage the filming. At the end, they send agents to steal the completed film reel, and this escalates into a chase scene and a fight using a Coke machine as a grenade launcher.

Literal corporate warfare is seen in a section of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life when the disgruntled employees of Permanent Assurance Company turn their building into a pirate ship and launch a raid on The Very Big Corporation of America.

In Avatar, the soldiers under Colonel Quaritch are part of SecOps, the corporation's private security force. Though they do indeed protect mining colony Hell's Gate from Pandora's megafauna and other threats, they're also used to fight the native Na'vi if they get in the way of operations, going so far as to blow up the Omaticaya's Hometree because it's sitting on a massive Unobtanium deposit.

Literature

In Jennifer Government, the corporate alliances come to the brink of all-out warfare, and step slightly over the line a few times before coming to their senses due to John Nike's influence.

In John Van Stry's Children of Steel series, wars between corporations over mines in distant systems aren't rare. Freighter crews (comprised mainly of indentured animorphs) are trained in combat and ships are easily converted into troop transports. A couple books are partially about a war between an alliance of corporations and a multi-system extremist group that hates animorphs.

In Frank Herbert's Whipping Star, Mliss Abnethe has such economic power (controlling a corporation that owns several worlds) that it's no surprise she has her own household troops.

Uller Uprising by H. Beam Piper has the Chartered Uller Company operate their own military forces on the titular planet. Many of its military personnel are former Federation regulars, and are well trained and equipped.

Congo by Michael Crichton. Although they don't engage in open warfare, the corporations racing to discover the lost city of Zinj engage in constant espionage and sabotage to hinder each other's efforts, in what's essentially a corporate version of the Cold War.

In the Alliance/Union series the Earth Company built a fleet of warships to bring the rebelling stations back under their fold. But the Union was better prepared and Earth eventually decided to cut their fleet off from supply, too costly.

Happens throughout the Periphery in The History of the Galaxy, with the various Mega Corps vying for market and resource control. Most corporations have small fleets of their own. One novel even deals with a corporation, whose CEO plots to take on the Confederacy of Suns itself after finding out that he's about to be indicted. As expected, the corporations are against any attempts by the Confederacy to regulate them.

In Mack Reynolds' Mercenary companies often settle contract disputes by armed conflicts commonly referred to as "frackuses" which are televised like spectator sports and are restricted to 19th century technology.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory references the covert side of this trope. Grandpa Joe mentions that Wonka shut down his factory because rival companies employed numerous spies to steal the secret formulas that made his company the biggest, and wealthiest, candy maker out there.

In David Drake's Ranks of Bronze galactic mercantile "guilds" are known to start wars on low-tech planets to secure predatory trade deals. Though, they are required by Federation laws to use the same tech level of weaponry as the natives, which is why one guild obtains a Roman legion.

The galaxy of Spinward Fringe is mostly dominated by megacorps, the largest of which can control hundreds of systems. They field fleets easily as powerful as any governmental body, and frequently go to war both with each other and with independent systems who are reluctant to accept their "protection"

In The Space Merchants, commercial law, which has largely or entirely replaced criminal law, permits a company to engage in a lethal feud with its rival upon serving a formal Notification. These are recognized as dangerous enough that private police forces charge special exorbitant rates to star-class personnel such as the protagonist, who wonders why he was targeted for attempted assassination in the absence of a Notification.

Live-Action TV

In Dark Matter "multi-corps" own entire planets, and hire mercenaries such as the Raza to wipe out independent planets that refuse to submit to them. And if that doesn't work they send their own troops.

Tabletop Games

One of the measures the Megacorp can use against the Runner in the card game NetRunner. Aside from using malevolent software to fry the Runner's brain, if the Megacorp manages to trace the location of the Runner, he can use anyting from saboteurs◊ and paramilitary forces◊ to bombing entire city blocks◊ in order to flatline the Runner. The page quote refers to a scoring card where the player's Megacorp goes to war against another corporation.

Classic Traveller supplement The Traveller Adventure. When Imperial MegaCorps decide to get rough they engage in "tradewars". They send out military forces to attack the other corporation's offices, factories, starships and other property. This can involve killing the other company's workers and management. This is known in the GURPS version as well.

A staple (and the main source of employment of the PCs) in Shadowrun. There are also the Desert Wars where megacorps pit their troops against one another to test their weapons and for publicity. For the most part though, most corporate warfare is of the "cold war" variety, fought in lots of small skirmishes conducted by deniable proxies. Player Characters, the titular Shadowrunners, find employment as those proxies.

Cyberpunk 2020 is a prime example, featuring a full-scale Corporate War between two of the biggest megacorps as a world-changing event and others having taken place in the backstory.

Mutant Chronicles had several Megacorps duking it out for supremacy in the solar system before and after the release of the Dark Legions.

In Eclipse Phase the Planetary Consortium deployed Direct Action to seize several Anarchist and Extropian habitats on the grounds that they were havens for software pirates (neither group acknowledges copyrights). However the Titanian Commonwealth decided to side with the anarchists and they formed the Autonomist Alliance.

A major part of the backstory to Hc Svnt Dracones is a war between newly risen Corptowns and traditional governments that saw them as a threat. It eventually went nuclear, the only survivors a couple corporate colonies on Mars.

"Hotzones" are areas where the IRPF has sanctioned a limited armed conflict between two corporations, typically within a single Corptown and resembling something between a hostile takeover and a gang war or football riot. The game's creator has also alluded to "Shadow Wars" between Mega Corps in isolated areas they keep their media subsidiaries far away from.

Deadlands features the spin-off game The Great Rail Wars, in which six companies fight to be the first to build a transcontinental railway and thus win lucrative contracts from the Union and Confederate governments for transporting the superfuel known as ghost rock (which is most abundant on the west coast). Each company has its a private army of "rail warriors", and that's before you factor in the witches, undead, supernatural martial artists and automata with human brains.

Warhammer40000 started off as Rogue Trader, a more role-playing focussed game than later editions in which armies were actually the private forces of the titular traders. While the game has evolved a bit since then, rogue traders still make appearances in the literature, often still in possession of significant forces able to contribute to whatever battle is taking place. This is why The Inquisition often pose as rogue traders - no-one will see anything suspicious in them owning a heavily armed cruiser packed with mercenaries.

While the Imperium as a whole doesn't have much influence from megacorps, on a planetary scale corporations are often the big players, with them often fighting over resources and influence. Dan Abnett's Necropolis is one of the rare times this fighting becomes bad enough for the Imperium to take notice and send forces in to ensure manufacturing quotas aren't harmed it turns out to be a Chaos cult uprising rather than the normal corporate infighting.

The 2009 Rogue Trader RPG de-emphasizes the war aspects of the setting (ironically), but given the player characters start out flying a kilometers-long starship that can fit multiple mercenary companies and enough firepower to level a small continent feuds between Rogue Trader dynasties can get bloody.

Video Games

Some of the main conflicts in Urban Galaxy are between 4 major corporations; the GIG, U50, P&C, and Star Chapman. They regularly employ the use of both Alliance and Outlaw mercenaries in order to pursue their goals. There is even an entire district about the conflict between U50 and GIG.

A staple part of the setting in any of the Armored Core games. Even in the universe where all of the corporations joined forces in a military coup against all world governments, they're still going at each others' necks and trying to gain control over the entire globe as well as outer space.

Played with in the Borderlands series. In the first game, it seems like a case of non-corporate individuals rebelling against an overpowering megacorp (Atlas), until you realize that the main characters are being manipulated by another megacorp (Hyperion). A conflict between Dahl and Atlas in the backstory is one of the main reasons why Pandora is such a Crapsack World. The Pre-Sequel plays it the straightest, with the core conflict between Dahl and Hyperion, though in this case it is a rogue Dahl fleet. The Pre-Sequel even makes mention of a "Corporate War" sparked by Hyperion that destroyed the central government of the galaxy, causing each of the corporations to be superpowers in their own right.

Corporations are the equivalent of player guilds in EVE Online, and they're able to go to war with one another.

The old storyline video stated that before the discovery of the EVE wormhole the megacorporations of earth fought one another when they reached the practical limits of stargate expansion.

Dark Orbit'sExcuse Plot is that three mining corporations don't get along and your job is to kill everyone not working for your corp.

The Mega Corps of Tachyon: The Fringe each maintain a private Space Navy, theoretically to protect their supply chains from piracy. They're not above using them in inter-company squabbles, however, and the central conflict of the game is between one corporation, GalSpan, and the Bora settlers.

The background of Team Fortress 2 is that the playable characters are mercenaries hired by one of the two corporations that secretly run the world to fight over gravel pits, driven by Sibling Rivalry of truly epic proportions between the CEOs.

Syndicate has corps warring over control of the planet, mostly via small teams of highly skilled Cyborg agents.

Civilization series: Certain Greed events that go under "Our corporation wants X resource under rival civilization's border, go and get it for massive cash. The other variant is that "our generals want X resource in enemy land, go get it old chap".

Civilization: Call to Power allows the players to eventually train lawyers and corporate branches to wage economic warfare on opponents. Though it's implied they're not actually violent.

Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri: Morgan Industries, like all the other factions, could just build a army and conquer everyone else. Then again, Morgan could easily win through economic means as well.

According to the background information, Nwabudike Morgan (leader of Morgan Industries) managed to get his start by hiring mercenaries to take over some diamond mines. Morgan's Earthly businesses also included funding "mercenary forces, U.N. escorts... and creating Morgan SafeHaven Hotel Fortress chain 'for the discriminating executive'."

Hawken: Player Characters are pilots that fight for Prosk and Sentium, the two dominant corporations on the planet. There was originally a third, but its downfall led to the Grey Goo outbreak threatening the planet.

The mega corps of the X-Universe series all maintain hundreds of fighters and a couple capital ships apiece, mainly to protect their supply chains from Space Pirates, Xenon, Kha'ak, and sometimes raiding fleets of rival governments. The player can engage in this as well, and can also be hired as a contractor by the corporations and be sent on (among other things) station defense and assassination missions.

Cerberus Daily News told a story of this happening in the War on Garvug story arc, between Mass Effect 2 and 3. The war started when a bunch of galactic mega corps invaded the planet Garvug for supposed Prothean artifacts. The krogan and vorcha that made up most of the world's population fought back well and eventually the corporate forces pulled out...only to return in the middle of Garvug's victory celebrations, killing most of the government officials with bombs and assassinations after coming out with a well-publicized "debate" over whether to pull out from the planet or not.

Early during Galactic history, the mostly-company-owned planet of Anhur effectively legalized slavery in the system, which resulted in a civil war between the pro-slavery batarians and the anti-slavery humans (and their hired guns from the mercenary company Eclipse) that populate the planet. Eclipse would later spin the positive publicity gained from defeating the slavers for all it was worth.

In Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, anything beyond the Lunar orbit is under the control of the Mega Corps, after they won the war against the IASA. Each Mega-Corp has its own private fleet that is frequently deployed against rival corporations and even IASA ships that stray beyond their space. The Player Character, Marcus Cromwell, is hired by SpaceTech to captain one of their corvettes. An early mission involves saving a friend of Marcus's, who is a captain in the IASA from two OSEC ships that ambush his ship.

The 'verse of the first Ground Control game has any warfare on Earth outlawed under the threat of nuclear annihilation. As such, Mega Corps tend to fight their issues out on other worlds. The focus of the game is on a habitable faraway moon called Krig-7B that is being claimed by both the Crayven Corporation and the Order of the New Dawn. While the Order is more a religion than a corporation, they are officially registered as a Mega-Corp (for political purposes), and their Pax Dei ("Peace of God") branch is, in some ways, superior to Crayven's mercenary army. For that matter, the Order's military tech is way more advanced than that of Crayven, but Crayven has managed to take Boring, but Practical to new heights, so they're evenly matched.

Medieval equivalent: In Crusader Kings II: The Republic Patrician families can go to war over trade posts, or attempt to seize cities and counties where they've built posts.

The goblin homeland of Kezan in World of Warcraft is ruled by many cartels. One character's backstory mentions that they warred against each other many times in the past, during "Trade Wars" which were apparently fought with bombings and ambushes in tunnels and storerooms.

This is the whole point of Executive Assault: a bunch of feuding corporations land on an alien planet and immediately start building robot armies and waging war to see who gets to exploit its resources.

In Evolve, there are five gigacorps that essentially serves as pseudonations. Each has a private army of mercenaries and robots that it uses to protect its assets and eliminate anything that might pose a threat to their status. One of the biggest events in the backstory of the game, the Mutagen Wars, was instigated by a corporation inciting a cluster of worlds into rebellion so they could then take over.

The Orochi Group of The Secret World possesses seemingly thousands of heavily-armed security personnel, along with humanoid drones, tanks, and even Humongous Mecha. However, it turns out that they aren't there to battle other corporations or even the secret societies; all the robots and war engines are used only in attempts to secure occult power from highly-dangerous sources, and the general public has no idea that they even exist.

Ultor Corporation in Saints Row 2 has it's own security force responsible for policing the district its headquarters are located in, the Stillwater Nuclear power plant, and a few other locations. This security force responds to crimes with APCs, attack helicopters, and their own special forces unit the Masako. The Masako are also used for targeted assassinations of potential enemies of the corporation. Various characters when faced with them describe Masako as a "Private army" and a "SWAT Team from hell" for a reason.

The Shai-Gen Corporation from Crackdown rules over their section of Pacific City with an iron fist. All citizens there are subjected to constant surveillance by Shai-Gen's intelligence branch looking for any discontent, constant propaganda and emotion suppressants to brainwash the citizens into compliance, and ruthless purging by Shai-Gen's Enforcers should any discontent arise. Shai-Gen's Research Division is also heavily invested in genetically engineering super soldiers, frequently kidnapping citizens to use as test subjects.

This is half the conflict in Warframe. The Corpus are a Mega-Corp that control half the Origin System, and spend their time fighting the Grineer for superiority (whenever they're not being assaulted by Tenno, of course).

Mega Man ZX: Slither Inc is a Mega-Corp that, among other things, provides energy for the whole city, and also employs an army made mostly of robots, primarily as peacekeeping agents.

Azure Striker Gunvolt: The Sumeragi Group deals with many kinds of things, from economics, security to entertainment, but they're primarily known for handling Adepts. It also has their own army, with robots as footsoldiers and certain powerful Adepts as officers.

Parodied in one arc of Newshounds where AOL attempted a military takeover of Starbucks, which failed as their troops were no match for stressed out baristas.

The R&D wars of Sluggy Freelance in the "4U City" Alternate Universe between a number of weapons manufacturers with strong ties to organized crime. In the prime universe Torg has been trying to take them down, but all his efforts have done is consolidate them into Hereti-Corp against everyone else.

Gargoyles: In the pilot, Xanatos Industries' headquarters is literally invaded by mercenaries from a rival company They were actually his own mercenaries pretending to steal something so Goliath's clan would be willing to "retrieve" it from said rival.

Real Life

The Dutch and British East India Companies both fielded private armies for fending off piracy and putting down native resistance to their colonial monopolies.

Not just pirates and natives; for much of the 18th century, whenever Britain and France went to war, the British and French East India Companies note the Honourable East India Company and the Compagnie des Indes Orientales respectively would dutifully declare war on one another as well. The Carnatic Wars in particular were fought largely by Company forces on both sides, with the British East India Company eventually emerging as the dominant of the two before the French company was eventually forcibly liquidated during The French Revolution.

Although the United States never created an East India Company, its closest equivalent would have to be the United Fruit Company, an American Mega-Corp capable of dictating terms to entireBanana Republics in Latin America (and in fact popularized the term "Banana Republic", as it held a monopoly on the banana trade in the region). At its peak, United Fruit wielded enormous control over port and rail infrastructure in several Central American countries, owned the world's largest private navy (even if it were a merchant fleet), and strong-armed national governments into granting it unlimited access to local land and labour. Most importantly, however, United Fruit controlled the regimes themselves, and installed or deposed political leaders according to its interestsit is strongly implied to have a hand in the 1954 coup d'etat that overthrew President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala and installed a CIA-backed dictator in his place. It didn't take long for Communist movements in the region to spring up and push back.

Due to fears that the newly independent government of the Congo would nationalise their industry, Belgian mining interests bankrolled the secession of two Congo provinces, Katanga and South Kasai, including the recruiting of mercenaries to defend them.

Pepsi briefly owned one of the largest navies in the world. Subverted though, despite all the jokes about the company attempting to finally win the cola wars. The Soviet Union decided to finally give up on its many failed attempts to make a cola that could compete with Coca Cola and just buy some Coke's major stateside competitor, Pepsi. Only Soviet currency was almost completely worthless internationally so the USSR and Pepsi had to barter. The agreement is that the Soviet Union would give Pepsi Russian Vodka, which at the time had been attributed almost mystical properties stateside similar to Cuban cigars now, and in exchange the Pepsi company would provide its signature beverage for the Soviet proletariat to enjoy. It worked well for a while and Pepsi and the USSR made a surprisingly effective team. However several factors, including the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and other Vodka's made outside of Russia increasing in quality, suddenly global demand for Russian Vodka became a lot less. Instead the Soviet Union started trading off old warships it didn't need to Pepsi for their scrap metal value. Pepsi did scrap them, but it hasn't stopped rumors that Pepsi still has a ballistic missile submarine hidden somewhere just in case.

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